The Cronon Affair: Wisconsin Answers

Universities don’t seem to breed much civil courage these days. But the University of Wisconsin is a glorious exception to the rule. When the Republican Party of Wisconsin demanded e-mails sent by and to William Cronon, it was the university—which serves as the official “record holder” for this purpose—rather than the individual professor that had to answer the request. It has now done so, with two lucid documents that show scrupulous concern for the rights of all involved.

John Dowling, senior legal counsel for the university, has now formally replied to Stephan Thompson, the Republican operative who invoked Wisconsin’s Public Records law. He has some lawyerly fun showing how badly the original request was drafted (in asking for all mails that contained the word “recall,” for example, the Republicans failed to state whether or not they wanted “e-mails containing the word ‘recall’ in the sense of recalling a past event [e.g., “I recall from our meeting last week …”]”). But that’s only the prelude to the serious business.

Meticulously balancing the public right to information against countervailing rights to privacy, Dowling explains why the university has held back all e-mails in several categories. These include all records related to students or potential students, to personnel matters, and to professional organizations. In these cases, the university has performed the common law balancing test incorporated in Wisconsin’s Public Records law, and determined that “the public interest in such communications is outweighed by other public interests favoring protection of such communications.”

In addition, the university has excluded all “intellectual communications among scholars.” Scholars, Dowling explains, need privacy to exchange and develop their ideas, “without fear of reprisal for controversial findings and without the premature disclosure of those ideas.” As he emphasizes, depriving state university faculty of these protections will drive the most talented of them to leave for private institutions. The university cannot provide the e-mails in question without doing massive harm to its ability to carry out its mission—and thus to the very public interest that the Public Records law is meant to serve.

Deftly though Dowling threads the legal needle, he does something simpler and more important as well. Examination of the entire body of e-mails yielded no evidence that Cronon had used his university account for political ends. Dowling states, with unlawyerlike clarity, that the university has found Cronon’s “conduct, as evidenced in the e-mails, beyond reproach in every respect.”

In an accompanying document, Biddy Martin, the chancellor of the university, addresses the case with equal clarity and force. She says, straight out, that Cronon “is one of the university’s most celebrated and respected scholars, teachers, mentors and citizens. I am proud to call him a colleague.” She makes clear that Cronon has done nothing improper; she defends academic freedom; and, in a final address to faculty, she encourages them “to ask difficult questions, explore unpopular lines of thought and exercise your academic freedom, regardless of your point of view”—and, presumably, regardless of politically motivated efforts at harassment.

Around the country, public universities are under attack. Governors and legislators deny that research and higher education are public goods that deserve support from public monies. So-called experts like the Texan Rick O’Donnell cobble together anecdotes from slipshod polemical books and political broadsides to show that faculty research is worthless (happily the Texas Exes, the University of Texas-Austin alumni association, seem to have headed offO’Donnell’s effort to put an end to faculty research at Texas’s great public universities). Conservative pundits and operators do their best to silence any professor who ventures into the public realm with the kind of unwelcome facts that scholarly and scientific expertise can produce.

The only way to resist this relentless, mindless attack is to explain, in plain language, why it’s wrong, and to destroy, with plain facts, the zombie factoids that serve as its weapons. Dowling and Martin have done both—and by doing so they have continued the great Wisconsin tradition that Cronon loves to evoke.